January 25, 2006

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  Men’s Fashion Luca Bruno/Associated Press, left and right; Alberto Pellaschiar/ Associated Press From left to right: MIU MIU A new take on the 1980’s new wave. BURBERRY Few signs of tartan but plenty of quilted fabrics. ARMANI Still the look of comfort. January 22, 2006 Fashion Review Milan Evokes Boardroom James Bonds By GUY TREBAY MILAN WHEN the fashion cops start pulling designers over and asking them to walk a straight line, it is clear that sobriety is in style. This is Safety Season in Milan, and, as it happens, that was the name of a band whose music underscored Wednesday’s Calvin Klein show, perhaps the most coherent presentation yet from that label’s designer, Italo Zucchelli, and one that signified Milan’s prevalent mood. The fashion business is infrequently inclined to consensus building. Yet something like collective agreement took hold last week, as designers fell in line with an unspoken effort to restore credibility to this city as a producer of men’s wear and to bring back the status lost to Paris when Hedi Slimane was hired to design Dior Homme. Very little in the last five years has had as much impact on how men dress as Mr. Slimane’s taut suits and “blood spattered” Richard Hell-style shirts. And by men, one is not just referring to scrawny 20-year-olds mysteriously able to fork over $2,000 for a Dior suit. It is clear a label is succeeding when it can rate editorial coverage in 032c, the hipster magazine from Berlin, and also outfit Richard D. Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner, and the senior partners at Deutsche Bank in New York, as Dior Homme does. Milan hasn’t come close to registering that kind of effect for a while. Yet if the restraint and smart styling on display lately is a gauge, the city seems close to reclaiming its cool. The models cast for Mr. Zucchelli’s fall 2006 collection for Calvin Klein looked vaguely like operatives for one of those cold war syndicates from which James Bond was always saving humankind. This is intended as praise. As mystifying as the failure by designers here to make reference to the Winter Olympics in Turin was the obliviousness to the style bonanza presented by Daniel Craig’s casting as the new Bond. Inadvertently perhaps, Mr. Zucchelli’s faintly boxy jackets, often double breasted and just grazing the top of the buttocks, and his lean trousers lopped at ankle height seemed precisely the sort of things to outfit MI6 operatives in the remake of “Casino Royale” and also to lend them a semblance of the suaveness no actor since Sean Connery has put across on screen. Even the label’s signature palette of shale grays, jades and hibiscus blues – holdovers from the days when Mr. Klein himself was designing – had a tonal sophistication geared for cinema. Mr. Zucchelli was one of a group who wisely chose to forgo the nonsensical narratives designers haul out to justify their imaginative shortcomings. Season after season one is treated to rock ‘n’ roll “stories” and narrative “moods” brought on by contemplation of the broody mists of the Scottish highlands. There is always at least one collection whose point of departure is that failed monarch and compulsive clothes dummy, the Duke of Windsor. All of these references were again in play, most notably in a fussy array of what looked like cassocks and surplices at Gucci. Unless Gucci has changed direction and is reorienting the label’s cocksure image to accommodate people who vote in papal conclaves, the designer John Ray’s offerings were a surprising misstep. Similarly, Alexander McQueen, another Gucci Group designer, brought out Korean-inspired kimonos, Jack the Ripper costumes, Fair Isle sweaters with skull motifs, suits reminiscent of Mick Jagger in “Performance” and trousers apparently inspired by Romany wanderers. It was a collection that was as catholic as the Gucci show, but in an altogether different way. As always with this designer, who cut his teeth on Savile Row, the suits were sophisticated, well detailed and ingenious, even when they had waistbands that landed at nipple latitude. But when a British journalist remarked that Gary Oldman could have worn anything in the show, a reference to the actor’s turn as Dracula, it was a reminder that vampires are thought not to cast a reflection in mirrors. In the case of Mr. McQueen’s more theatrical efforts this might be considered a plus. Set starkly against the week’s more arrant silliness was the assured restraint of Raf Simons in his design debut for Jil Sander. Ringing changes on the narrow silhouette now in favor, Mr. Simons presented clothing that was linear and boxy, indisputably sexy and at the same time as utilitarian and strict as uniforms for a modern day spook. Real spooks probably do their surveillance from behind a computer bank wearing fuzzy slippers and coffee-stained sweats. But any spy worth his iris scan would be proud to sport one of Mr. Simons’s stiff leather jackets with a bonded wool two-button suit the color of a cement overcoat. And the art dealers who form a firm client base for the label will undoubtedly find delight in the sweaters with necklines that when worn over a white shirt evoke the shape of a Robert Gober urinal. In similar style designers who are as unalike as Christopher Bailey at Burberry, Alessandro Dell’Acqua and Jasper Conran presented shows that showcased almost ostentatious restraint. Mr. Bailey has traded in his familiar Crayola palette for hues that bring to mind the lees from a cask of aged port. There were blessedly few signs of the label’s oppressive bland tartan and a fair amount of the high-low styling games so nimbly played by Mr. Bailey’s competitor Miuccia Prada. In Mr. Bailey’s hands the game took the form of complicated quilted fabrics rendered as a double-belted trench and paired with his version of a tuxedo worn with a geeky knit cap and winkle-picker brogues. Mr. Dell’Acqua and Mr. Conran also offered slick, well-detailed shows close to monochromatic (unless ink on gray on smoke counts as a color combination) and suits cut so appealingly narrow that the models looked like strokes from a Sufi manuscript. One of the not-so-subtle messages of the week was that being fashionable requires pushing back from the table when the dessert trolley rolls around. Bellows pleats and expandable waistlines may have made Dockers a $1 billion brand in under 20 years, but those styles were invented for a baby boomer generation whose next destination on the sartorial train may involve the Depends aisle at Duane Reade. Younger men have adapted to the lessons that have been a fashionable woman’s burden since Eve. Whether it takes Pilates, 1,000 daily situps or a surgeon’s cannula, a narrow waist is the fashionable sine qua non. Giorgio Armani is so keen on the point that he posed for an Italian news magazine wearing only gym shorts and sneakers. The preternaturally lean Mr. Armani is 70 plus. Mr. Armani continues to assert his belief that men are sexier when slightly languorous and have an identifiable waist. This is the message he has put across since Richard Gere was photographed doing inverted situps in “American Gigolo.” That cinematic clunker was made a quarter century ago and marked the first public awareness of Mr. Armani and, not coincidentally, an overall shift in perceptions about the utility of men. Gigolos were not new to the screen of course. Rudolph Valentino made them an oily specialty. Yet as irresistible as women allegedly found that silent screen star, he was a menace and an anathema to men. By the time Mr. Gere turned up, guys had become a lot more comfortable in passive roles. It is a curiosity of Mr. Armani’s success that his clothes, though priced for and marketed to men in the professions, remain insistently feminine and soft. His show on Thursday, titled “Velvet Man,” featured voluminous trousers, frock coats and plush fabrics in gem tones, uniformly paired with velvet pumps. If the designs look less likely to suit the boardroom than the boudoir, one cannot dispute, based on the volume of his business, that he must have insights into men’s sartorial comfort zones. The opposite may be true of Miuccia Prada, who toys not just with sexual norms but also with anatomy. Few designers outside of Japan have so consistently warped the masculine silhouette as Ms. Prada did at both Prada and Miu Miu. For her Prada show she dropped crotches, tightened and belted pants legs, made jackets tubular, added gauntlets and topped her models’ heads with fur motorcycle helmets, which gave them the cranial volume of giant bugs. She asserted that her ambition was to invoke the heroic dreams of men and boys, which was credible in a Fantastic Four kind of way. At Miu Miu, Ms. Prada, guided by the stylist Olivier Rizzo, summoned another pop cultural fantasy, the new wave 1980′s, as imagined by some melancholy Japanese kid hanging out on Harajuku bridge. All the referents one typically finds at this poseurs’ crossroads were on full display: studded boots, layered sweaters and jackets, checked blazers buttoned crazily high and worn straitjacket tight, even trousers with stirrup straps. It was Yohji Yamamoto for people too junior to recall that designer before he became the Sneaker King. If the vision was not to every taste, at least it was consistent and complete. In an odd way the same could be said of both Roberto Cavalli and Valentino, two designers whose names are rarely mentioned in the same breath. For exuberant vulgarity nobody tops Roberto Cavalli, and that is his charm. Retailers and editors love to slag Mr. Cavalli’s clothes as flashy, underdesigned and overornamented, and of course they are. What makes them appealing is their lack of pretense at class. As the rich become more segregated from hoi polloi and gradually less visible, they deprive the rest of us of the amusing spectacle of how they live. Mr. Cavalli conjures wealth in the soap operatic manner of a fashion Aaron Spelling. Bosomy zillionaires (Victoria Beckham in this case) mince about in dresses with feathered bodices and gilt leather sandals. Their crotch-stuffed lovers wear laced ruffle shirts and butter-leather jeans. An element of veracity in these concoctions is clearly what kept viewers glued to “Dynasty.” It is also what buys fuel for the helicopters Mr. Cavalli flies while communing with nature, the thing he says he most enjoys. When Valentino Garavani quits the planet, his destination is jet-set heaven. The aviation equipment is private, and the carrier is Valentino Airlines. Inside an old Milanese palace Mr. Garavani installed a pretend airport lounge as imagined by someone who never whiled away the hours clocking delays on the departures board while snacking on sad pretzel mix. The lighting was soothing. There were comfy leather banquettes. The ambient music made a preflight Ambien unnecessary. As a celestial voice intoned news of arrivals, travel archetypes (the old, the young, the straight, the gay, the rock ‘n’ roll and the canine) disembarked and sashayed off Valentino’s ark of the air. As we all must, Valentino Airlines passengers pushed luggage carts, but they did so in suits of crisp elegance or coats of crocodile. Who can say, really, what the show’s commercial value was? Who, in a certain sense, cares? For a few delirious moments on a chill Milanese afternoon it was a delight to be a passenger on Mr. Garavani’s flight of fantasy, wherever it was bound. Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

  Waiting Tables Tony Cenicola/The New York Times January 25, 2006 Critic’s Notebook My Week as a Waiter By FRANK BRUNI IT’S 7:45 p.m., the East Coast Grill is going full tilt and I’m ready to throttle one of the six diners at Table M-8. He wants me to describe the monkfish special. For the fourth time. I hoarsely oblige, but when I return yet again to my riff on the apricot lager mustard, which comes right before my oratorical ode to the maple pecan mashed sweet potatoes, his attention flags and he starts to talk to a friend. Does he mistake me for a recorded message, paused and played with the push of a button? Doesn’t he know I have other tables to serve? I need to go over and massage the mood at R-5, where one of the two diners has a suspiciously shallow pool of broth in her bouillabaisse, perhaps because I spilled some of it near M-2. And I need to redeem myself with the two diners at X-9, who quizzed me about what the restaurant had on tap and received a blank stare in response. I’m supposed to remember the beers? Along with everything about the monkfish, these oddly coded table references, more than 10 wines by the glass and the provenance of the house oysters? I had no idea. I usually spend my nights on the other side of the table, not only asking the questions and making the demands but also judging and, I concede, taking caustic little mental notes. And it’s been 20 years since I walked in a waiter’s shoes, something I did for only six months. But last week I traded places and swapped perspectives, a critic joining the criticized, to get a taste of what servers go through and what we put them through, of how they see and survive us. My ally was Chris Schlesinger, a well-known cook and author who owns the East Coast Grill, in Cambridge, Mass., and has no business interests in New York. So that my presence in the restaurant wouldn’t become public knowledge, he introduced me to his staff as a freelance writer named Gavin doing a behind-the-scenes article to be placed in a major publication. In some ways this restaurant, which opened in 1985 and specializes in fresh seafood and barbecue, was an easy assignment. Its service ethic is casual, so I didn’t have to sweat many niceties. Its food is terrific, so diners don’t complain all that much. But its pace can be frenetic, and servers have little room to maneuver among 100 or so tightly spaced seats. From Monday through Saturday, I worked the dinner shift, showing up by 3:30 and usually staying past 11. I took care of just a few diners at first and many more as the week progressed. And I learned that for servers in a restaurant as busy as the East Coast Grill, waiting tables isn’t a job. It’s a back-straining, brain-addling, sanity-rattling siege. Monday Pop Quiz and Chop Chop Every day at 4 p.m., the servers take a pop quiz. This afternoon’s questions include ones on how the restaurant acquires its oysters and the color, texture and taste of mahi-mahi. Before and after the quiz they tackle chores: moving furniture, hauling tubs of ice from the basement, folding napkins. I pitch in by chopping limes into quarters and lemons into eighths. I chop and chop. My fingers go slightly numb. The servers range in age from their early 20′s to their late 40′s. Some go to school or hold other jobs on the side. Many would like to do less physically demanding work. All would like to earn more money. If they put in a full schedule of four prime shifts a week, they might make $45,000 a year before taxes. Almost all of it is from tips. They wonder if diners realize that. Bryan, a young server with whom I’m training, brings me up to speed on the crazy things diners do. They let their children run rampant, a peril to the children as well as the servers. They assume that the first table they are shown to is undesirable and insist on a different one, even if it’s demonstrably less appealing. They decline to read what’s in front of them and want to hear all their options. Servers disparagingly call this a “menu tour.” I acquire a new vocabulary. To “verbalize the funny” is to tell the kitchen about a special request. “Campers” are people who linger forever at tables. “Verbal tippers” are people who offer extravagant praise in lieu of 20 percent. The doors open at 5:30 and soon two women are seated at L-3. They interrogate Bryan at great length about the monkfish, which, in changing preparations, will be a special all week long. He delivers a monkfish exegesis; they seem rapt. They order the mahi-mahi and the swordfish. “It’s amazing,” Bryan tells me, “how unadventurous people are.” How unpredictable, too. During a later stretch, Bryan has a man and a woman at L-3 and two men at L-4. The tables are adjacent and the diners receive the same degree of attention. The men at L-4 leave $85 for a check of $72 – a tip of about 18 percent. L-3′s check is $58, and Bryan sees the man put down a stack of bills. Then, as the man gets up from the table, the woman shakes her head and removes $5. The remaining tip is $4, or about 7 percent. Tuesday Ice, Ice Baby I’m shadowing Tina, who has worked at the East Coast Grill for decades and seen it all. She is handling the same section Bryan did. She offers a psychological profile of a woman sitting alone at L-3, who declared the chocolate torte too rich and announced, only after draining her margarita, that it had too much ice. “Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed,” Tina says. Some people are worse. Arthur, a young server who is fairly new to the restaurant, recalls a man who walked in and announced that he had a reservation, a statement Arthur distrusted. The East Coast Grill doesn’t take reservations. Arthur tried to finesse the situation by saying he was unaware of the reservation but hadn’t worked over the previous three days. “You haven’t worked in three days?” the man said, according to Arthur’s recollection. “You’re going to go far in life!” At about 9:30, a half-hour before the kitchen stops accepting orders, I take my first table, two women and a man. I ask them if they want to know about the half-dozen specials. “We want to know everything,” the man says. The statement is like a death knell. I mention the monkfish, but forget to say that it comes with a sweet shrimp and mango salsa. I mention the fried scallops, and I’m supposed to say they’re from New Bedford, Mass. But that detail eludes me, so I stammer, “Um, they’re not heavily breaded or anything.” They seem puzzled by my vagueness and poised to hear more. I’ve got nothing left. What unnerves me most is trying to gauge their mood. Sometimes they smile when I circle back to check on them. Sometimes they glare. In addition to dexterity, poise and a good memory, a server apparently needs to be able to read minds. Wednesday Who Really Needs a Drink? I’m under Jess’s wing. She’s young, funny and generous with her encouragement. That final quality turns out to be crucial, because after I greet four diners at M-7, I’m informed that one of them has an affiliation with the Culinary Institute of America. As I walk toward them with a bowl of house pickles, which is the East Coast Grill’s equivalent of a bread basket, my hand shakes and several pickles roll under their table. I can’t tell if they notice. But I can tell they don’t trust me. I’m tentative as I recite the specials, and I ask one of them if he wants another Diet Coke. He’s drinking beer. They all look at me as if I’m a moron. Jess tells me that enthusiasm is more important than definitive knowledge, that many diners simply want a server to help them get excited about something. “You’ve got to fake it until you make it,” she says. I take her pep talk to heart, perhaps too much so. I handle three men at M-6, one of whom asks, “Between the pulled pork platter and the pork spareribs, which would you do?” I tell him I’d change course and head toward the pork chop. “It’s that good?” he says. “It’s amazing,” I say. I’ve never had it, but I’ve seen it. It’s big, and so is he. He later tells me, “Dude, you so steered me right on that pork chop.” I serve four young women at M-9. They order, among other dishes, the “wings of mass destruction.” Per the restaurant’s script, I warn them away from it, pronouncing it too hot to handle. They press on and survive. One of them later wonders aloud whether to have the superhot “martini from hell,” made with peppered Absolut. I didn’t even know it was on the menu before she mentioned it. “Why worry?” I say. “With those wings, you climbed Everest. The martini’s like a bunny slope.” She orders it and drinks it and she and her friends leave a 22 percent tip (which, like all the tips I receive, will be given to the other servers). The three men at M-6 leave 20 percent. Have I become a service God? Thursday I’m Really Allergic to Tips … Divinity must wait. It’s on this night that I spill bouillabaisse, confront my limited beer knowledge and silently curse Mr. Monkfish at M-8. I move up to an evening-long total of eight tables comprising 20 diners; on Wednesday I served five tables and 17 diners. I encounter firsthand an annoyance that other servers have told me about: the diner who claims an allergy that doesn’t really exist. A woman at X-10, which is a table for two, or a “two top,” repeatedly sends me to the kitchen for information on the sugar content of various rubs, relishes and sauces. But when I ask her whether her allergy is to refined sugar only or to natural sugars as well, she hems, haws and downgrades her condition to a blood sugar concern, which apparently doesn’t extend to the sparkling wine she is drinking. She orders the sirloin skewers, requesting that their marginally sweet accouterments be put on a separate plate, away from her beef but available to her boyfriend. He rolls his eyes. Pinging from table to table, I repeatedly forget to ask diners whether they want their tuna rare or medium and whether they want their margaritas up or on the rocks. I occasionally forget to put all the relevant information – prices, special requests, time of submission – on my ordering tickets. At least everyone at M-8, including Mr. Monkfish, seems content. As I talk to one of the women in the group, another server noisily drops a plate bound for a nearby table. A rib-eye steak special skids to a halt at the woman’s feet. “Is that the cowboy?” she says, using the special’s advertised name. “That looks really good!” About an hour later M-8′s spirits aren’t so high. They’re motioning for me, and it’s a scary kind of motioning. The two credit cards I’ve returned to them aren’t the ones they gave me. One of my last tables is a couple at X-1. They take a bossy tone with me, so when the woman asks if it’s possible to get the coconut shrimp in the pu pu platter á la carte, I automatically apologize and say that it’s not. It turns out that I’m right. (I guiltily check a few minutes later.) It also turns out that servers make such independent decisions and proclamations, based on the way diners have treated them, all the time. Friday Do Not Jump the Shark Apparently everything up to now has been child’s play. Business will double tonight. People will stand three deep at the bar, closing lanes of traffic between the kitchen and some of the tables. “Like a shark,” Chris Schlesinger tells us, “you’ve got to keep moving or you die.” My chaperone is Christa, who’s as down to earth and supportive as Jess. She’s supposed to watch and inevitably rescue me as I try to tackle an entire section of five tables, each of which will have at least two seatings, or “turns.” By 7:30, all of these tables are occupied, and all have different needs at the same time. One man wants to know his tequila choices. I just learned the beers that afternoon. Another man wants directions to a jazz club. Someone else wants me to instruct the kitchen to take the tuna in one dish and prepare it like the mahi-mahi in another. That’s a funny I’ll have to verbalize, a few extra seconds I can’t spare. I’ve developed a cough. It threatens to erupt as I talk to three diners at M-6. Big problem. I obviously can’t cough into my hand, which touches their plates, but I can’t cough into the air either. I press my lips together as my chest heaves. I feel as if I’m suffocating. The kitchen accepts orders at least until 10:30 on Fridays and Saturdays. I’m dealing with diners until 11. By then I’ve been on my feet for more than six hours. Over the course of the night I have surrendered only two tables and six diners to Christa. I have taken care of 11 tables and 32 diners myself. Except I haven’t, not really. When my tables needed more water, Christa often got it. When they needed new silverware, she fetched it, because I never noticed. Truth be told, I wasn’t so good about napkin replacement either. Saturday Feeding the Hordes My last chance. My last test. The restaurant ended up serving 267 diners on Friday night. It will serve 346 tonight. Between 5:30 and 5:50, I get five tables, each of which needs to be given water, pickles, a recitation of the specials and whatever coddling I can muster. The couple at one table want a prolonged menu tour. I’m toast. Once again I try to tackle an entire section, seven tables in all. Dave is my minder. He tells me to make clear to diners that they need to be patient. “If you don’t control the dynamic, they will,” he says. I don’t control the dynamic. Around 6:30 I ask him to take over a table I’ve started. As some diners leave and new ones take their places, I ask him to take over a few more tables. I deliver a second vodka on the rocks with a splash of Kahlúa to a woman at L-9. Before I can even put it down, she barks, “There’s too much Kahlúa in that!” Nice to know you, too, ma’am. I do some things right. I point a couple at L-6 toward the tuna taco, because by now I’ve tasted it and I know it’s fantastic. They love it and tell me they love me, a verbal tip supplemented by 17 percent. The next couple at L-6 barely talk to me, seek and receive much less care and leave a tip of over 50 percent. Go figure. I do many things wrong. I fail to wipe away crumbs. I don’t write the time on one ticket. I write M-12 instead of L-12 on another, creating a table that doesn’t exist. Around 8:45, my shirt damp with perspiration, I hide for five minutes in a service corridor, where I dip into the staff’s stash of chocolate bars. Then I suck on a wedge of lemon, a little trick I learned from Bryan, to freshen my breath. By the end of the night I’ve served a total of 15 tables comprising 38 people. Some of these people were delightful, and most tipped well, keeping my weeklong average – for a comparatively light load of tables – at about 18 percent. Some weren’t so great. They supported an observation that Dave made about restaurants being an unflattering prism for human behavior. “People are hungry, and then they’re drinking,” he noted. “Two of the worst states that people can be in.” I recall a young woman at a six-top who bounced in her seat as she said, in a loud singsong voice: “Where’s our sangria? Where’s our sangria?” Her sangria was on the way, although she didn’t seem to need it, and the bouncing wasn’t going to make it come any faster. Around 11:30 all the servers are treated to a shot of tequila. I drink mine instantly. I’m exhausted. I’ll still feel worn out two days later, when I chat briefly on the telephone with Jess, Christa and Dave, who by that point know the full truth about me. “I think you got a good sense,” Dave says. I think so, too, if he’s talking about trying to be fluent in the menu and the food, calm in the face of chaos, patient in the presence of rudeness, available when diners want that, invisible when they don’t. It’s a lot, and I should remember that. But I’d still like frequent water refills. And a martini from hell. Straight up. Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

  Recomendations on the Web A search for the band Coldplay produced these results on liveplasma.com, a site that helps people find movies and music they may like. The circle sizes reflect the relative popularity of the artists. Copyright N.Y. Times. 2006. January 23, 2006 Like This? You’ll Hate That. (Not All Web Recommendations Are Welcome.) By LAURIE J. FLYNN SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 22 – On Amazon.com, a customer interested in buying the novel “The Life of Pi” is also shown “The Kite Runner” because other Amazon customers – presumably with similar tastes – also purchased that book. That’s just one approach among many in the science of recommendation software. Web technology capable of compiling vast amounts of customer data now makes it possible for online stores to recommend items tailored to a specific shopper’s interests. Companies are finding that getting those personalized recommendations right – or even close – can mean significantly higher sales. For consumers, a recommendation system can either represent a vaguely annoying invasion of privacy or a big help in bringing order to a sea of choices. “It’s like if your music is in Tower Records and no one knows it, you’re nowhere,” said Tim Westergren, a founder of Pandora, an online music site, and of the Music Genome Project. “On the Internet, it’s that times 100.” But spewing out recommendations is not entirely without risk. Earlier this month, Walmart.com issued a public apology and took down its entire cross-selling recommendation system when customers who looked at a boxed set of movies that included “Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream” and “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson” were told they might also appreciate a “Planet of the Apes” DVD collection, as well as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” and other irrelevant titles. The company said that the problem was created last year when the Web site set out to promote African-American films for Martin Luther King’s Birthday. It linked a set of four African-American films to a group of 263 popular movies also boxed into sets, hoping that the links would give the four films more exposure. “Unfortunately,” said Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, in a statement, “some of the inadvertent combinations were very offensive.” Wal-Mart’s trouble stemmed not from the aggressive use of advanced cross-selling technology, but from the near lack of it. Companies with more nuanced strategies have avoided embarrassing linkages. At NetFlix, the online DVD rental company, for example, roughly two-thirds of the films rented were recommended to subscribers by the site – movies the customers might never have thought to consider otherwise, the company says. As a result, between 70 and 80 percent of NetFlix rentals come from the company’s back catalog of 38,000 films rather than recent releases. “The movies we recommend generate more satisfaction than the ones they choose from the new releases page,” said Neil Hunt, NetFlix’s chief product officer. “It increases customer loyalty to the site.” Mr. Hunt said NetFlix’s recommendation system collected more than two million ratings forms from subscribers daily to add to its huge database of users’ likes and dislikes. The system assigns different ratings to a movie depending on a particular subscriber’s tastes. For example, “Pretty Woman” might get a four- or five-star rating if other people who share a customer’s taste in movies rated it highly, while the same film might not appear on another customer’s screen at all, presumably because other viewers with that customer’s tastes did not rate it highly. “The most reliable prediction for how much a customer will like a movie is what they thought of other movies,” Mr. Hunt said. The company credits the system’s ability to make automated yet accurate recommendations as a major factor in its growth from 600,000 subscribers in 2002 to nearly 4 million today. Similarly, Apple’s iTunes online music store features a system of recommending new music as a way of increasing customers’ attachment to the site and, presumably, their purchases. Recommendation engines, which grew out of the technology used to serve up personalized ads on Web sites, now typically involve some level of “collaborative filtering” to tailor data automatically to individuals or groups of users. Some engines use information provided directly by the shopper, while others rely more on assumptions, like offering a matching shirt to a shopper interested in purchasing a tie. And some sites are now taking personalization to another level by improving not only the collection of data but the presentation of it. Liveplasma.com, an online site for music and, more recently, movies, graphically “maps” shoppers’ potential interests. A search for music by Coldplay, for example, brings up a graphical representation of what previous customers of Coldplay music have purchased, presented in clusters of circles of various sizes. The bigger the circle, the greater the popularity of that band. The circles are clustered into orbits representing groups of customers with similar preferences. “This is a way of showing recommendations that are vastly more useful than textual links,” said Whit Andrews, a research vice president at Gartner Inc., a market research company in Stamford, Conn. Another development under way is matching customer tastes across Web businesses, using knowledge of a customer’s tastes in music to try to sell them books, for example. “To date, that’s been largely uncharted territory,” Mr. Andrews said, though not for lack of trying. Web sites have long tried to develop systems for cross-selling among companies that protect customer privacy but also allow sharing of data. While large online stores are having success through recommendations, smaller Web sites are having a more difficult time using the technology to their advantage. Developing a system for cross-selling is expensive, and perhaps most important, requires amassing a huge amount of customer data to be effective, said Patty Freeman Evans, a Jupiter Research analyst. As a result, according to Ms. Evans, fewer than one-quarter of online shoppers make unplanned purchases when they are online, a far smaller percentage than customers at actual stores. Walmart.com’s DVD sales site now has no automated recommendation system at all. The music section of Walmart.com, however, uses a system closer to that of Amazon, where customers are given recommendations based on music they’ve purchased in the past. The company is also looking at using that technology for the DVD section, along with movie reviews and guides that are automatically linked to customer searches. Carter Cast, president of Walmart.com, says personalized recommendations are one of the company’s “important priorities” for its Web store. “It’s convenient and helpful for customers, and it does help generate sales,” Mr. Cast said, referring to the personalization feature on Walmart.com’s music section. Certainly, Apple’s iTunes store has benefited from its ability to recommend songs and artists. In fact, its newest feature, called MiniStore, is able to make recommendations based on songs in users’ playlists, no matter where they came from. When someone is using the MiniStore and selects a song on the playlist, Apple will automatically collect that information. The feature, however, has been criticized by privacy advocates who say it allows Apple to snoop on customers. Under pressure, Apple decided last week to make the feature an option that customers get only on request.

  Blogs by Lawyers October 7, 2005 Opening Arguments, Endlessly By JONATHAN D. GLATER Inside every lawyer, it is said, there is a brilliant writer, held back by professional ambition or by fear of failure. Nowhere is that truism more evident than in the explosion of online blogs by, for and about lawyers. There is Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a lawyer who opines on politics in an online journal at www.dailykos.com, which recently held a poll on possible presidential candidates in 2008. T. Evan Schaeffer shares thoughts on law cases in Ohio and elsewhere through www.legalunderground.com. Neil Wehneman, who just started law school, plans to share everything he learns there at www.lifeofalawstudent.com. And John H. Hinderaker is one of the lawyers behind www.powerlineblog.com, which contributed to the downfall of Dan Rather. “It’s all words, that’s all the law is,” Scott Turow, a lawyer and the author of “Presumed Innocent” and other novels, said when asked to speculate on reasons for the proliferation of law-related blogs, sometimes called blawgs. When people think of law, he continued, “You think of jails and marshals and corporate executives. But the reality is, that’s what it is – it’s all words, and lawyers are verbal people, both in terms of the written stuff and the spoken stuff.” There is no reliable data on how much of the blog universe consists of lawyers, or of any other profession, for that matter. But several influential blogs do seem to be run by lawyers, who constitute considerably less than 1 percent of the population. A survey conducted by Blogads.com, which administers online advertising on blog sites, and completed voluntarily by 30,000 blog visitors last spring, found that 5.1 percent of the people reading the blogs were lawyers or judges, putting that group fourth behind computer professionals, students and retirees. The survey also found that of the 6,232 people who said they also kept their own blogs, 6.1 percent said they were in the legal profession, putting lawyers fourth again, behind the 17.5 percent who said they were in the field of education, 15.1 percent in computer software and 6.4 percent in media, said Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads. He conceded that the survey was hardly scientific, but argued that at least it undermined the popular image of the blogosphere as dominated by antsy teenagers and programmers in their pajamas, tapping away at keyboards all night. If lawyers are talking a lot online, perhaps that is not surprising – lawyers talk a lot offline. But lawyers were quick to offer less cynical justifications for the trend, if indeed there is one. Good lawyers write well, quickly and clearly and do not fear arguments, said Mr. Hinderaker of powerlineblog.com. “Most people’s personalities are such that they don’t really like conflict and are shy about putting arguments and opinions out in public where they’re going to be attacked,” he said. “Obviously lawyers do that all the time.” Lawyers may also find some of their day-to-day tasks unrewarding, he continued, and blogging offers a way to wield more influence in discussions of topics that they care about – especially politics. The law “is a business that attracts a lot of people who have quite a bit of ability and ambition,” he said. “For many of them, their law practice doesn’t fully satisfy that desire to play a part in the world.” Mr. Turow, the author, noted that people who might once have kept a journal now keep a blog. ” ‘One L’ today would be a blog,” he said, referring to his memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School. “I kept a journal. These days I probably would post it.” Mr. Wehneman, who is just starting law school, has not yet built the audience he hopes for his blog chronicling the experience. But after he moves onto his advanced classes on intellectual property, he said, “I really expect that there would be huge interest.” The law has always fascinated lawyers and nonlawyers alike, which may explain some of the sites’ popularity. “Lawyers tend to have something credible to say about an important subject,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who nevertheless expressed skepticism about Blogads’ survey results. “Lawyers have been educated about the legal system, which people are interested in.” That helps to explain the number of blogs by law professors, ruminating on developments in politics, fashion, culture and, of course, the law. Mr. Volokh maintains www.volokh.com; Lawrence Lessig of Stanford writes at www.lessig.org; Jack Balkin of Yale posts at balkin.blogspot.com; and Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee maintains www.instapundit.com. (Needless to say, lawyers and law firms too numerous to count have hung out virtual shingles, too.) “It’s our natural environment, to read things on the Web, to read news stories, and to have something to say,” said Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who posts her views at althouse.blogspot.com. Compared with spending a year writing a law review article, she said, blogging is fun. The proliferation of law blogs is helpful, according to Denise M. Howell, who works at Reed Smith in Los Angeles and who claims credit for coining the term “blawg.” She said the blogs demystified the law without costing outrageous sums; led to more open, frequent and occasionally informed discussions of politics, law and occasionally morality; and helped forge links between practicing lawyers, law professors, law students and the real world. “Blogs break down the barriers,” she added. 4:55 PM – 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit – Remove

  Personal Note Earlier this week I posted an entry relating to my intention to share my some experiences that have consumed my life during these last weeks. My problem is that I am uncertain as to where I can begin, as much of this story relates to a tragic loss of life in the family of someone that I have known personally and professionally over the last ten years. At this point in time I am not completely certain how much of this story I can divulge without compromising the confidence of my friend in some very real way. Perhaps I should not mention any of this at all until I am able to know which direction this will take. However, I see that more than a few people have seen fit to visit this site for one reason or another, and out of respect for you I would like you to know that I have as many questions as I have words to describe what I have experienced. In more ways than one I am hoping that by sharing this I may have the benefit of some of the insights of people who may happen by here and read these pages. In short, it involves the very unimaginable horror of a young son, the son of my friend, who took his own life on Christmas Day. He was nineteen years old. As a father I can not imagine even what this can be as a magnitude of pain and grief. I have spent many hours with my friend, and I am so lost in what makes life so hard and unexplainable. More than anything I am simply frightened by life itself. It makes me feel like what if this ever happened to me, if God forbid my own son ever died in such a way. When I am with my friend I think of this constantly.  And how is this man even standing up. and I wonder all the time that he must be thinking that he will wake up and it will all just be a dream Even myself, I feel like sometimes I am dreaming in this nightmare. Meanwhile, this is a good man, a deeply spiritual man. His son was apparently left completely overwhelmed and despondent over the breakup of a love relationship. Please anyone who ever reads this promise me that you will say at least one prayer for my friend and his grieving wife and daughter. Sincerely and With Deepest Gratitude, Michael

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